Canvassing is not a strategy

By Adrian McMenamin

I first did it in April 1982. In January 1983 I was actually detained by the police for doing it in a Bermondsey street. I still do it today, most recently in Seven Sisters in Haringey. My friend Joe thinks we should do more and my other friend Luke thinks we should do it for longer.

We are talking about canvassing. And although I confess to being a serial offender (though not in the Bermondsey case – there the police had confused my 17-year-old self and my 16-year-old brother with a couple of door to door con artists) I really have to disagree about its utility.

The Reading Pad is the stuff of legend in Labour Party circles, the pieces of paper that propelled Ian ‘Mik’ Mikardo into parliament in what was thought to be rock solid Tory territory – Reading of course – in 1945.

But the very age of the system points to its weakness. In 1945 86% of the votes cast went to either Labour or the Conservatives, by 1951 the figure had risen to 93%. It really was a battle of “class against class” – if Labour got its voters out they won, if the Tories got theirs out they won. Elections were about motivating and cajoling voters who had already made up their minds.

But that era is long gone. In 1997 the two-party figure was down to 74% and by 2005 it was just 68%. The two party age of massive voting blocks is over and more and more voters need to be persuaded – the very thing we have always been told canvassing (or the even more explicitly named Voter ID) is not for.

It is not that I think canvassing is a waste of time. It plainly is not. In Seven Sisters in four hours of knocking up I can be sure of having persuaded two unlikely voters to get out of their house and down to the polling station – not to be sniffed at when the Labour majority was less than 70.

But maybe we should absorb the lesson that the Lib Dems (a party whose membership has declined almost as rapidly as our own) grasped long ago – that in the weeks leading up to polling day canvassing brings a poor return on the limited amount of time and resources available in most campaigns.

Instead we should be devoting the effort to those tasks that do most to persuade people of the need to vote Labour. In many cases that means more “weight of paper” campaigns with better, snappier leaflets (if only Fraser Kemp was available to every Labour councillor). In others it means investing time into electronic communications and designing better permissive (undecided voters come to you) systems. Opinion surveys and canvassing will of course be part of it all, but we shouldn’t turn the act of knocking on a door and asking a voter if they’ve made up their mind about how to vote into a fetish. It’s a tactical tool, no longer a strategy.

OK, if you’ve got this far without your blood boiling (I have been accused of being an elitist sell-out for advancing this argument before) I should state that I have written this as a provocation rather than a fully realised argument. I do have real doubts about canvassing but I also want to hear the argument. In the meantime, if you are a Labour councillor, MP, MEP or candidate and want help in setting up a free email list that will allow interested voters to subscribe to hear your views, contact me at [email protected].